Ganga Ghosh, a jazz singer in Varanasi, hears pianist Ghost Wakefield on her radio and stays up all night enchanted by his playing. Although it's shut off, her radio tells her, "Go ride the music," setting into motion a wild road story and romance, at turns comical, seductive, criminal and redemptive. In these three interlocking novellas, they meet in Mexico, build a duet in New York and discover during a tour of the South that she becomes, through his haunted, New Orleans-flavored introductions, the voice and presence of Billie Holiday, Lena Horne and the other immortals she impersonates, a gift she returns to Ghost in a most unusual way and at a most opportune hour.

Reviews & Acclaim

From the moment you sit yourself down beside Ghost, who is behind the wheel of an infinitely blue Dodge on the outskirts of Baltimore, you know you're in for a fabulous journey where all the exotic songbirds will sing and the gods of every chakra will chime in. From its tongue down to its toes Go Ride the Music lets it fly. Here is Kirpal Gordon, spiritual visionary and sensual word master, at his best, propelling us like Ornette Coleman beyond our conventional orbits through double doors of mundane existence to new and compelling worlds. Come ride these words-it'll be the holiest funkiest ride of your life, a full barreled open throated six cylinder love supreme.
George Wallace, editor, PoetryBay

Go Ride the Music is language at its finest, a labor of heart and soul from a master word slinger who Huck Finns his way down a Mississippi of song, of jazz, folk and blues. It's the kind of give and take improv that can only come with discipline, skill, deep knowledge and years of patient hard work.
Michael Adams, author of Steel Valley

Gordon's delivery, especially in "Ganga Runs the Voodoo Down," is extraordinarily successful in that it presents you with the extra-extra summit of eroticism: very imageful, very actual, very happening-at-that-moment but without the slightest hint of pornography.
Barbara Wright, translator of French literature

Go Ride the Music is utterly original. I love the language-which dances, sings and delves deeply into both visionary Buddhism and contra-Buddhist satire, riding the music of a yin/yang beat-and dig the characters, presented inside-out. Praise to Kirpal Gordon for creating such a bluesy, true and deliciously rueful novel, a sweet, hip, jazzy pas de deux.
Howard Mandel, author of Future Jazz and Miles Ornette Cecil